New Delhi : Affle, the leading international mobile media company, today announced a massive upgrade for its Pinch mobile messaging platform. In addition to pure messaging, Pinch would now enable users to chat with friends, find new friends, access exciting locations services and participate in social contests, all on their data plans or Wi-Fi without incurring any local or international SMS/MMS charges. The Pinch upgrade, dubbed Version 2.0, has a completely new brand identity and a sleeker and unified UI (user interface).

Anuj Kumar, CEO, Affle said, “The latest version of Pinch further strengthens our offerings on the messaging platform and complements our existing product SMS2.0 Live, which has already got us over 20 million downloads in Asia alone.

This new version is exciting as it has a lot of new features and is made available on top seven mobile platforms, making it reach out to almost all smart & feature phones globally. As part of this upgrade, we are particularly excited to announce a first in the world endeavour, the unique Pinch-to-SMS technology which allows Pinch to reach even non data devices through SMS. Through this Pinch users will now be able to send SMSs and receive messages back in the Pinch environment thus bringing the reach, reliability and robustness of the SMS platform to smart phone messaging. We are confident that this upgrade will change messaging as it exists today by making cross platform data messaging on phones very popular.’’ Kumar added.

Pinch version 2.0 runs across all dominating mobile phone platforms including iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) Android, Symbian (Nokia), Blackberry, Windows Phone, J2ME, Mobile Internet and SMS through local carrier partnerships. Through this multi-platform feature, Pinch bridges the gap between smart phone enthusiasts and users of feature phones to bring about freedom of communication with anyone on any mobile phone.

Charles Yong, Director, Product Development, Affle, said, “Pinch is truly the first cross functional messaging platform in the way it services users from all dominating platforms. With this new upgrade we have made the offering on Pinch much richer by adding cool features like Group Chats, Delivery notifications, Better location sense and Pinch-to-SMS. We have also capitalised on our technology strengths and understanding of the telecom ecosystems to create a product which is intuitive, fast, easy to use and has strong appeal for both users and business partners. We are confident that users will really enjoy using Pinch.”

With the new navigation of Pinch, sending messages to friends will be easier and faster. Users will be able to send free text messages to a group of friends at once through the group messaging feature. Invite friends to join study groups or be able to organize parties easily, connect with families and colleagues while planning for a get-together or reunions easily and conveniently with the instant Pinch group messaging.

Users of new version of Pinch will now be able to see friends typing out a reply and get informed on the various delivery notifications to know real time updates on the status of each individual message as either “S” for messages sent, “D” for messages delivered, and “R” for messages that has already been read. Pinch’s Leader-board has also been strengthened significantly with more ways to accumulate Pinch points using the additional user features.

In the coming months Pinch will add ‘Chat rooms’ to its features. Chat rooms will allow users to explore and connect with people with similar interests, create or hang out on free online communities, discuss anything and everything under the sun.

Users can enjoy Pinch by downloading the application from any of the popular app stores across platforms or from the Pinch website.